How Important Is Web Design?

As more companies expand their online presence, it becomes easy to separate the experienced salesman from the amateur. There's more to a website than fancy graphics, creating an outline, and adding links.

The concept of web design is not at all new, but it's misunderstood by many who are just starting out in the online business scene. The truth of the matter is that an optimal website design has never been as important as it is today; it can be the difference maker between a successful business and a complete failure.

This article focuses on key aspects of what makes a website great. It will show you why you need to hire a web design company to flesh out your ideas and goals. They do so much more than just focusing on the visual aspect of a site.

Navigation and User Interface

Sure, having a fancy looking website with a complementary color design is important. After all, you wouldn't want your readers to leave because their eyes hurt. But choosing the right color, selecting where the logo goes, or which ad goes where, is just the superficial part of web designing.

What a digital design agency can do for your business is present your product in the best possible light. Not only that but it will also create a user-friendly environment for visitors that will keep them browsing for more products or more information.

If you take online retail websites as an example, they all do basically the same thing. They provide an online marketplace which the customer can browse. People then search for specific products, filter out categories, check prices, reviews, and eventually order. It doesn't take a marketing specialist or a PhD in art to tell when such a website is responsive and easy to use, and when it looks cluttered and seems like a nightmare to navigate.

The navigation experience is the most important aspect of any website. The main reason businesses should contract a web development agency is so they can have access to experienced developers. Those people know exactly what a search engine wants to see, and they also know what a site visitor needs to remain engaged with the website and turn into a returning customer.

Having a wide range of products to sell is not enough if it takes your customer minutes to browse through the lists. Search engine optimization matters to Google or Bing but it doesn't matter to customers. If you have a bad layout and an unresponsive website, the customer will just move on to the next page on the list.

Another great thing about working with a digital design agency is that they employ specialists who know how to lead visitors to targeted places on the site without making them feel forced. Everything can be arranged in such a way that it makes sense for a visitor to go from link to link. But this takes time and skill and can't be achieved easily.

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Projecting a Trustworthy Image

This is where the visual aspect begins to matter. If you want your business to succeed you need to look trustworthy. In the virtual world, it's the website that becomes a spokesperson for your business. In order to maintain a good image, you have to consult the expertise of a web design company.

If you are a restaurant customer, who would you rather want to serve you? The waiter with spotless attire and a lot of knowledge of the menu, or the laid-back waiter who acts like he didn't want to get out of bed that morning? The same question can be applied to the world of online branding and design.

Too many ads popping up on your site will drive customers away despite what you may think. It's a web designer's job to know exactly what type of ads could work and where to place them in order to not interfere with the visitor's browsing experience.

If your website has bad hosting and basic coding behind it, you can expect it to be very slow and have a low uptime rating. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that a website like that doesn't project a trustworthy image to potential clients. Web design also helps if you want to have a stable website because the site will be created by trained professionals and not self-taught know-it-alls.

Search Engine Optimization

Finally, we reached the SEO aspect of a website. While SEO is no doubt important if you want to bring in customers, it is not what's going to keep them on your site. SEO is a good way to increase traffic and get yourself known online.

But what does this have to do with the importance of web designing? Everyone that's more than familiar with the internet knows how search engines work. Because of this, the placement of your SEO content matters a lot to site visitors.

No one is going to spend hours browsing your site and learn what you want them to if they are blasted by SEO pieces which clearly read like traffic increase articles. A web designer's job also implies that he or she will convey to you how to manage SEO content without driving away customers. This also ties in with projecting a trustworthy image. You have to look like you know what you're doing and not just fishing for clicks. Web design is what makes that happen.

Conclusion

Web development can make or break your online business venture. It controls all aspects of your website from how it looks to how users interact with it. Designing a website is more like building a car than sewing a custom suit.

Your website has to offer a great user-browsing experience, clearly lay out what your company is all about, advertise your products in a non-aggressive way, and do all that without breaking down. That's how you keep people coming back to it and that's why you need professional web designers to work on it.

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